The Dissolution of the Monasteries, sometimes
referred to as the Suppression of the Monasteries,
denotes the administrative and legal processes between 1536 and
1541 by which Henry VIII disbanded monasteries, nunneries
and friaries in England, Wales and Ireland; appropriated their income, disposed of
their assets and provided for their former members. He was given
the authority to do this in England and Wales by the Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament in 1534, which made
him Supreme Head of the Church in England; and by the First Suppression Act (1536) and the Second Suppression Act
(1539). Although some monastic foundations dated back to Anglo
Saxon England, the overwhelming majority of the 825 religious
communities dissolved by Henry VIII owed their existence to the
wave of monastic enthusiasm that had swept England and Wales in the
11th and 12th centuries; in consequence of which religious houses
in the 16th century controlled appointment to about a third of all
parish benefices, and
disposed of about half of all ecclesiastical income. The
dissolution still represents the largest legal transfer of property
in English history since the Norman Conquest.

Contents

Context

The Dissolution of the Monasteries did not take place in
political isolation. Other attacks on the historic institutions of
Western Catholicism had been under way for some
time, many of them related to the Protestant Reformation in Continental
Europe; however, the religious changes in England under Henry
VIII and Edward VI were of a different nature from those taking
place in Germany, Bohemia, France and Geneva. On the Continent, while the nobles were
acquiring a taste for Church plunder, there was the added element
of mass discontent against ecclesiastical power and wealth among
common people and the lower levels of clergy and civil society. In
England the early Reformation was directed from the highest levels
of society, but was met with widespread popular suspicion; spilling
over, in particular occasions and localities, into active
resistance.

The dissolution resulted in few modifications to the practice of
religion in England's parish churches; and in general the English
religious reforms of the 1530s corresponded in few respects to the
precepts of Protestant Reformers, and encountered much popular
hostility when they did. The Protestant flavour of innovations
expressed in the Ten Articles were reversed when Henry VIII
expressed his desire for continued orthodoxy with the Six
Articles of 1539, which remained in effect until after his
death.

Cardinal Wolsey had obtained from the Pope a Papal Bull authorising
some limited reforms in the English Church as early as 1518, but
reformers (both conservative and radical) had become increasingly
frustrated at their lack of progress. Henry was determined to
change this, and parliamentary acts reforming apparent abuses in
the English Church were passed in November 1529. They set caps on
fees for probating wills and mortuary expenses for burial in
hallowed ground, tightened regulations covering rights of sanctuary for criminals,
and reduced to two the number of church benefices that could in the future be held by
one man. These sought to demonstrate that establishing royal
jurisdiction over the Church would ensure progress in "religious
reformation" where Papal authority had been insufficient. The
monasteries were next in line.

J.J. Scarisbrick remarked;

Suffice it to say that English monasticism was a huge and urgent
problem; that radical action, though of precisely what kind was
another matter, was both necessary and inevitable, and that a purge
of the religious orders was probably regarded as the most obvious
task of the new regime - as the first function of a Supreme Head
empowered by statute "to visit, extirp and redress".

The stories of monastic impropriety, vice and excess that were
to be collected by Thomas Cromwell's
visitors may have been biased and exaggerated, although chronicled
also by Sir Thomas More. Nevertheless, the
religious houses of England and Wales, with the notable exceptions
of those of the Carthusians, the Observant Franciscans, and the Bridgettine nuns, had long ceased to play a
leading role in the spiritual life of the country; and other than
in these three orders, observance of strict monastic rules were
partial at best. Donations and legacies now tended to go instead
towards parish churches, university colleges, grammar schools and
collegiate churches; which suggests public approbation of such
purposes. Levels of monastic debt were increasing, and average
numbers of professed religious were falling. Only a few monks and
nuns lived in conspicuous luxury, but most were very comfortably
fed and housed by the standards of the time, and few any longer set
standards of ascetic piety or religious observance. Only a minority
of houses could now support the twelve or thirteen professed
religious usually regarded as the minimum necessary to maintain the
proper round of the Divine Office. Extensive monastic complexes
dominated English towns of any size; but most were less than half
full.

Nor was it insignificant that Cromwell and Henry, from 1534
onwards, were constantly seeking for ways to redirect
ecclesiastical income to the benefit of the crown; efforts they
justified by the contention that much ecclesiastical revenue had
been improperly diverted from royal resources in the first place.
Princes throughout Europe were facing severe financial difficulties
due to sharply rising expenditures, especially to pay for armies,
fighting ships and fortifications. Most tended sooner or later, to
resort to plundering monastic wealth, and taxing the clergy.
Protestant princes might claim a godly authority to do so; Catholic
princes might seek the approval of the Papacy (readily granted, in
exchange for a share of the spoils). The wealth of the Church was a
standing temptation for secular rulers; and idle monastic wealth
was the most exposed target.

English
precedents

By the time Henry VIII turned his mind to the business of
monastic reform, royal action to suppress religious houses had a
history stretching back more than 200 years. The first case was
that of the so-called 'Alien Priories'. As a result of the Norman Conquest some French religious
orders held substantial property through their daughter monasteries
in England. Some of these were merely agricultural estates with a
single foreign monk in residence to supervise things, others were
rich foundations in their own right (e.g. Lewes Priory which was a daughter of Cluny and answered to
the abbot of that great French house). Owing to the fairly constant
state of war between England and France in the Late Middle Ages successive
English governments had objected to money going overseas to France
from these Alien Priories ('trading with the enemy') whence the
French king might get hold of it, and to foreign prelates having
jurisdiction over English monasteries. Furthermore, after 1378,
French monasteries (and hence alien priories dependent on them)
maintained allegiance to the continuing Avignon Papacy, and so their suppression
was supported by the rival Roman Popes, conditional on all
confiscated monastic property eventually being redirected into
other religious uses. The king's officers first sequestrated the
assets of the Alien Priories in 1295-1303 under Edward
I, and the same thing happened repeatedly for long periods over
the course of the Fourteenth Century, most particularly in the
reign of Edward III. Those Alien Priories
that had functioning communities were forced to pay large sums to
the king, while those that were mere estates were confiscated and
run by royal officers, the proceeds going to the king's pocket.
Such estates were a valuable source of income for the Crown in its
French wars. Some of the Alien Priories were allowed to become
naturalised (for instance Castle Acre Priory), on payment of
heavy fines and bribes, but for the rest their fates were sealed
when Henry
V dissolved them by act of Parliament in 1414. The properties
went to the Crown; some were kept, some were subsequently given or
sold to Henry's supporters, others went to his new monasteries of
Syon Abbey and the Carthusians at Sheen Priory, others
went to educational purposes. All these suppressions enjoyed Papal
approval, though successive 15th century Popes continued to press
for assurances that, now that the Avignon Papacy had been defeated,
the confiscated monastic property would revert to religious and
educational uses.

The royal transfer of monastic estates to educational
foundations proved an inspiration to the bishops, and as the 15th
century waned such moves became more and more common. The subjects
of these dissolutions were usually small and poor Benedictine or Augustinian men's houses or poor nunneries
with few powerful friends; the great abbeys and orders exempt from
diocesan supervision such as the Cistercians were unaffected. The consequent
new foundations were most often Oxford University and Cambridge University colleges, instances of
this include John
Alcock, Bishop
of Ely dissolving the Benedictine nunnery of Saint Radegund to found Jesus College, Cambridge
(1496), and William Waynflete, Bishop of
Winchester acquiring Selborne Priory in 1484 for Magdalen College, Oxford. In
the following century Lady Margaret Beaufort obtained
the property of Creake Abbey (whose religious had all died of Black Death in 1506) to
fund her works at Oxford and Cambridge, an action she took on the
advice of such a staunch traditionalist as John Fisher Bishop of Rochester. In 1522
Fisher himself is also found dissolving the nunneries of Bromhall
and Higham to aid St John's College,
Cambridge. That same year Cardinal Wolsey dissolved St Frideswide's Priory (now Oxford Cathedral) to form the basis of his
Christ Church, Oxford; in 1524 he
secured a Papal bull
to dissolve some 20 other monasteries to provide an endowment for
his new college. In all these suppressions, friars, monks and nuns
of were absorbed into other houses of their respective orders. The
conventional wisdom of the time was that the proper daily
observance of the Divine Office of prayer required a
minimum of twelve professed religious, but by the 1530s only a
minority of religious houses in England could provide this; and
accordingly most observers were agreed that a systematic reform of
the English church must necessarily involve the drastic
concentration of monks and nuns into many fewer, larger, houses;
potentially making much monastic income available for more
productive religious, educational and social purposes. But what may
have represented a consensus in general principle, often faced
strong resistance in practice. Members of religious houses proposed
for dissolution might resist relocation; the houses invited to
receive them might refuse to co-operate; and local notables might
resist the disruption in their networks of influence. Moreover, the
bishops found intractable opposition when they sought to enforce
the rigorous observation of monastic rules; especially in respect
of their attempts to require monks and nuns to remain within their
cloisters. The King actively supported Wolsey, Fisher and Richard Foxe in their
programmes of monastic reform; but even so, progress was painfully
slow, especially where religious orders had been exempted from
episcopal oversight by Papal authority.

Continental precedents

While these transactions were going on in England, elsewhere in
Europe events were taking place which presaged a storm. In 1521, Martin Luther had
published 'De votis monasticis' ('On the monastic vows'), a
treatise which declared that the monastic life had no scriptural
basis, was pointless and also actively immoral in that it was not
compatible with the true spirit of Christianity. Luther also
declared that monastic vows were meaningless and that no one should
feel bound by them. Luther, a one-time monk, found some comfort
when these views had a dramatic effect: a special meeting of German
members of the Augustinian
Friars, (of which Luther was part) held the same year accepted
them and voted that henceforth every member of the regular clergy
should be free to renounce their vows, resign their offices and to
get married. At Luther's home monastery in Wittenberg all the monks save one did
so.

News of these events did not take long to spread among
Protestant-minded (and acquisitive) rulers across Europe, and some,
particularly in Scandinavia, moved very quickly. In Sweden in 1527 King Gustavus
Vasa secured an edict of the Diet allowing him to confiscate
any monastic lands he deemed necessary to increase royal revenues;
and to force the return of donated properties to the descendants of
those who had donated them. In one fell swoop, Gustav gained large
estates and a company of diehard supporters. The Swedish
monasteries and convents were simultaneously deprived of their
livelihoods, with the result that some collapsed immediately, while
others lingered on for a few decades before persecution and further
confiscations finally caused them all to disappear by 1580. In Denmark, King Frederick I of Denmark made his
grab in 1528, confiscating 15 of the houses of the wealthiest
monasteries and convents. Further laws under his successor over the
course of the 1530s banned the friars, and forced monks and nuns to
transfer title to their houses to the Crown, which passed them out
to supportive nobles, who were soon found enjoying the fruits of
former monastic lands. Danish monastic life was to vanish in a way
identical to that of Sweden.

In Switzerland,
too, monasteries came under threat. In 1523 the government of the
city-state of Zurich pressured nuns to leave their
convents and marry, and followed up the next year by dissolving all
monasteries in its territory, under the pretext of using their
revenues to fund education and help the poor. The former religious
who correctly cooperated with the scheme and were offered help with
learning a trade for their new secular lives, and in some cases
were granted pensions.......... The city of Basel followed suit in 1529 and Geneva adopted the same policy in 1530. An
attempt was also made in 1530 to dissolve the famous Abbey of St. Gall, which was a state of the
Holy Roman
Empire in its own right, but this failed, and St. Gall has
survived.

It is inconceivable that these moves went unnoticed by the
English government and particularly by Thomas Cromwell,
who had been employed by Wolsey in his monastic suppressions, and
who was shortly to become Henry VIII's chief minister. However,
Henry himself appears to have been much more influenced by the
opinions on monasticism of the humanists Desiderius
Erasmus and Thomas
More, especially as found in Erasumus's work In Praise of Folly (1511) and More's Utopia 1516. Erasmus and More
promoted ecclesiastical reform while remaining faithful Catholics,
and had ridiculed such monastic practices as repetitive formal
religion, superstitious pilgrimages for the veneration of relics
and the accumulation of monastic wealth. Henry appears from the
first to have shared these views; never having endowed a religious
house, and only once having undertaken a religious pilgrimage (to
Walsingham in 1511).
From 1518 Thomas More was
increasingly influential as a royal servant and counsellor, in the
course of which his correspondence included a series of strong
condemnations of the idleness and vice in much monastic life;
alongside his equally vituperative attacks on Luther. Henry himself
corresponded continually with Erasmus; prompting him to be more
explicit in his public rejection of the key tenets of Lutheranism,
and offering him church preferement, should he wish to return to
England.

Process

Visitation of a monastery

On failing famously to receive his desired annulment from the
Pope, Henry had himself declared Supreme Head of the Church in England in
February 1531. In April 1533 an Act in
Restraint of Appeals eliminated the right of clergy to appeal
to "foreign tribunals" (Rome) over the King's head in any spiritual
or financial matter. All ecclesiastical charges and levies that had
previously been payable to Rome, would now go to the King. Those
who refused to assent to the Royal Supremacy were liable to
execution for treason - a fate which befell the London Carthusians and Observant Franciscans in 1535, with the consequent
confiscation of their religious houses. By the Submission of the Clergy, the
English clergy subscribed to the proposition that the King was, and
had always been, the Supreme Head of the Church in England.
Consequently, in Henry's view, any act of monastic resistance to
royal authority would not only be treasonable, but also a breach of
the monastic vow of obedience.

In 1534 Henry had Parliament authorise Thomas Cromwell to "visit" all the monasteries, including
those like the Cistercians previously exempted by Papal
dispensation, to purify them in their religious life, and to
instruct them in their duty to obey the King and reject Papal authority. In the meanwhile,
Cromwell had also undertaken an inventory of the assets and income
of the entire ecclesiastical estate of England and Wales, including
the monasteries (see Valor Ecclesiasticus), through
local commissioners who reported in May 1535. Once the valuation
was complete, Cromwell delegated his visitation authority to
hand-picked commissioners; chiefly Richard Layton, Thomas Legh, John ap Rice and John
Tregonwell; for the purposes of ascertaining the quality of
religious life being maintained in religious houses; of assessing
the prevalence of 'superstitious' religious observances such as the
veneration of relics; and for inquiring into evidence of
moral laxity (especially sexual). The chosen commissioners were
mostly secular clergy, and appear to have been Erasmian in their
views, and dismissive of the value of monastic life. An objective
assessment of the quality of monastic observance in England in the
1530s would almost certainly have been largely negative, but
Cromwell did not leave such matters to chance. Monastic life, both
numerically speaking and in the rigour of religious observance, had
been in decline for some time. By 1536, the thirteen Cistercian houses in Wales held only 85
monks amongst them. However, where the reports of misbehaviour
returned by the visitors can be checked against other sources, they
commonly appear to have been greatly exaggerated, often recalling
events and scandals from years before.

In the autumn of 1535, the visiting commissioners were sending
back to Cromwell written reports of all the lurid doings they
claimed to have discovered. In a few instances, impropriety and
irreligion had been so great that the commissioners had felt
compelled to suppress a house on the spot; in others, the abbot,
prior or noble patron was reported to be petitioning the King for a
house to be dissolved. Such authority had formerly rested with the
Pope, but now the King would need to establish a legal basis for
dissolution in statutory law. Accordingly Parliament enacted the Dissolution of
the Lesser Monasteries Act in early 1536, relying in large part
on the reports of "impropriety" Cromwell had received, establishing
the power of the King to dissolve religious houses that were
failing to maintain a religious life; and consequently providing
for the King to compulsorily dissolve monasteries with annual
incomes of less than £200 (of which there were potentially 419);
but also giving the King the discretion to exempt any of these
houses from dissolution at his pleasure. Accordingly, many
monasteries proposed for dissolution put forward a case for
continuation, offering to pay substantial fines in recompense; and
many of these cases were accepted, so that only 243 houses were
actually dissolved at this time.

The houses identified for suppression were then visited by a
further set of commissioners charged with effecting the
arrangements for closure, and empowered to obtain prompt
co-operation from monastic superiors by the offer of pensions and
cash gratuities. The property of the dissolved smaller houses
reverted to the Crown and Cromwell established a new government
agency, the Court of Augmentations to manage
it; while the ordinary monks and nuns were given the choice of
secularization (with a cash gratuity but no pension), or of
transfer to a continuing larger house of the same order. The
majority chose to remain in the religious life, and, in some areas,
the premises of suppressed religious houses were recycled into
newly founded houses to accommodate them. Two houses, Norton Priory in Cheshire, and Hexham Abbey in Northumberland,
attempted to resist the commissioners by force; actions which Henry
interpreted as treason, resulting in his writing personally to
demand the summary brutal punishment of those responsible. The
prior and canons of Norton were imprisoned for several months, and
were fortunate to escape with their lives; the monks of Hexham, who
made the further mistake of becoming involved in the Pilgrimage
of Grace, were executed.

This first round of suppressions contributed to popular
discontent in the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536; an
event which led to Henry increasingly associating monasticism with
betrayal, as most of the spared religious houses in the north of
England (more or less willingly) sided with the rebels; while
former monks resumed religious life in several of the suppressed
houses. Although Henry continued for a while to maintain that his
sole objective was monastic reform, it became increasingly clear
that official policy now envisaged the total end of monasticism. Hugh Latimer,
appointed bishop of Worcester in 1535, and a reformer with
pronounced Lutheran sympathies; had successfully
encouraged the wealthier monasteries in his diocese to provide
active support in preaching, prayer and charity to their local
communities. Latimer wrote to Cromwell in 1538 to plead for the
continuation of Great Malvern Priory, and of "two
or three in every shire of such remedy"; but by then only total
surrender was acceptable. Government lawyers scripted a legal
pretext, in that the superior of a religious house (abbot, abbess,
prior or prioress) was the "owner" of the monastic property of the
house; and hence, if the superior were to be convicted of treason,
all the property of the abbey would legally revert to the Crown.
One major Abbey whose monks had been closely implicated in the
Pilgrimage of Grace was that of Furness in Lancashire; and the abbot, fearful
of a treason charge, petitioned to be allowed to make a voluntary
surrender of his house, which Cromwell happily approved. From then
on, all dissolutions that were not a consequence of convictions for
treason, were legally "voluntary"; a principle that was taken a
stage further with the voluntary surrender of Lewes priory in November 1537, when for the first
time the monks were offered life pensions if they co-operated, and
were not accorded the option of transfer to another house. This
created a "stick and carrot" in favour of further dissolution.
Abbots and priors came under pressure from their communities to
offer voluntary surrender, if they could obtain favourable terms
for pensions; while also knowing that if they refused to surrender,
they might suffer the penalty for treason; and their religious
house would be dissolved anyway. In 1538 applications for surrender
became a flood, and Cromwell appointed local commissioners to
encourage rapid compliance with the King's wishes, to supervise the
orderly sale of monastic goods and buildings, and to ensure that
the former monks and nuns were provided with pensions, cash
gratuities and clothing. Monks or nuns who were handicapped or
infirm were marked out for more generous treatment, and care was
taken throughout that there should be nobody cast out of their
place unprovided for (who might otherwise have increased the burden
of charity for local parishes). The endowments of the monasteries,
landed property and appropriated parish tithes and glebe, were transferred to the Court
of Augmentations, who would thereon pay out life pensions at
the agreed rate (subject to a 10% tax deduction).

None of this process of legislation and visitation had applied
to the houses of the friars. At the beginning of the 14th
century there had been around 5,000 friars in England, occupying
extensive complexes in all towns of any size. But by the 16th
century their income from donations had collapsed, their numbers
had shrunk to under 1,000 and their buildings were often ruinous,
or leased out commercially. Consequently, almost all friars were
now living outside their friaries; many, in contravention of their
formal rules, supported themselves through paid employment and some
held personal property. In 1538 Cromwell deputed Richard Ingworth, Bishop of Dover
and former Provincial of the Dominicans, to obtain the friars'
surrender; which he did by drafting new injunctions that strictly
enforced each order's rule, facing the friars with the choice of
compliance with the king's wishes, or starvation. On surrender, the
friars received a gratuity of 40 shillings each, but were not
offered pensions.

The local commissioners were instructed to ensure that, where
abbey churches were also used for parish worship, this should
continue. Accordingly over a hundred former monastic churches
remained in use for parochial worship in whole or in part, in
addition to the fourteen former monastic churches that continued as
cathedrals. Otherwise the most marketable fabric in monastic
buildings was likely to be the lead on roofs, gutters and plumbing,
and buildings were burned down as the easiest way to extract this.
Building stone and slate roofs were sold off to the highest bidder.
Many monastic outbuildings were turned into granaries, barns and
stables. In some instances, wealthy parishes purchased a monastic
church for their own purpose, and many others bought choir stalls
and stained glass windows. Cromwell had already instigated a
campaign against "superstitions": pilgrimages and veneration of
saints, in the course of which, ancient and precious valuables were
grabbed and melted down; the tombs of saints and kings ransacked
for whatever profit could be got from them, and their relics
destroyed or dispersed. Even the crypt of King Alfred the
Great was not spared the looting frenzy. Great abbeys and
priories like Glastonbury, Walsingham, Bury St. Edmunds,
and Shaftesbury
which had flourished as pilgrimage sites for many centuries, were
soon reduced to ruins. However, the tradition that there was
widespread mob action resulting in destruction and iconoclasm, that altars and windows were smashed, partly confuses the
looting spree of the 1530s with the vandalism wrought by the Puritans
in the next century against the Anglican privileges.

The Crown became richer to the extent of around £150,000 per
year, although around £50,000 of this was committed to fund
monastic pensions; and Cromwell had intended that the bulk of this
wealth should serve as regular income of government. However, after
Cromwell's fall in 1540, Henry needed money quickly to fund his
military ambitions in France and Scotland; and so monastic property
was sold off, usually at the market rate of twenty years' income;
raising over £1,400,000 by 1547. The purchasers were predominantly
leading nobles, local magnates and gentry; with no discernible
tendency in terms of conservative or reformed religion, other than
a determination to maintain and extend their family's position and
local status. The Court of Augmentations retained lands and
spiritual income sufficient to meet its continuing obligations to
pay annual pensions; but as pensioners died off, or as pensions
were extinguished when their holders accepted a royal appointment
of higher value, then surplus property became available each year
for further disposal. The last surviving monks continued to draw
their pensions into the reign of James I.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries impinged relatively little on
English parish church activity. Most parish churches had been
endowed with chantries, each
maintaining a stipended priest to say mass for the souls of their donors. In addition
there remained after the dissolution of the monasteries, over a
hundred collegiate churches in England, whose
endowments maintained regular choral worship though a corporate
body of canons, prebends or priests. All
these survived the reign of Henry VIII largely intact, only to be
dissolved under the Chantries Act of 1547, by Henry's son Edward
VI, their property being absorbed into the Court of
Augmentations, and their members being added to the pensions list.
Since many former monks had found employment as chantry priests,
the consequence for these clerics was a double experience of
dissolution, perhaps mitigated by being in receipt thereafter of a
double pension.

Ireland

Quin Abbey, a
Franciscan Friary built in the 15th century and suppressed in
1541

The dissolutions in Ireland followed a very different course
from those in England and Wales. There were around 400 religious
houses in Ireland in 1530 - many more, relative to population and
material wealth than in England and Wales. In marked distinction to
the situation in England, in Ireland the houses of friars had
flourished in the 15th century, attracting popular support and
financial endowments, undertaking many ambitious building schemes,
and maintaining a regular conventual and spiritual life. They
constituted around half of the total number of religious houses.
Irish monasteries and nunneries, by contrast, had experienced a
catastrophic decline in numbers, such that by the 16th century, it
appears that only a minority maintained the daily religious
observance of the Divine Office. Henry's direct authority, as Lord of Ireland, and from 1541 as King of Ireland, only extended to the area
of the Pale immediately
around Dublin. Outside this
area, he could only proceed by tactical agreement with clan chiefs
and local lords.

Nevertheless, Henry was determined to carry through a policy of
dissolution in Ireland - and in 1537 introduced legislation into
the Irish Parliament to legalise the closure of
monasteries. The process faced considerable opposition, and only
sixteen houses were suppressed. Henry remained resolute however,
and from 1541 as part of the Tudor
Reconquest of Ireland, he continued to press for the area of
successful dissolution to be extended. For the most part, this
involved making deals with local lords, under which monastic
property was granted away in exchange for oaths of allegiance to
the new Irish Crown; and consequently Henry acquired little if any
of the wealth of the Irish houses. By the time of Henry's death
(1547) around half of the Irish houses had been suppressed; but
many houses of friars continued to resist dissolution until well
into the reign of Elizabeth

Consequences

The abbeys of England, Wales and Ireland had been among the
greatest landowners and the largest institutions in the kingdom;
although, by the early 16th century, religious donors increasingly
tended to favour parish churches, collegiate churches, university
colleges and grammar schools, and these were now the predominant
centres for learning and the arts. Nevertheless, and particularly
in areas far from London, the abbeys, convents and priories were
centres of hospitality and learning, and everywhere they remained a
main source of charity for the old and infirm. The removal of over
eight hundred such institutions, virtually overnight, rent great
gaps in the social fabric.

In addition, about a quarter of net monastic wealth on average
consisted of "spiritual" income arising from the appropriation of
parish tithes where the religious house held the
advowson of a benefice with the legal
obligation to maintain the cure of souls in the parish, either by
endowing a vicar or by
appointing a stipendiary
priest. On the dissolution these spiritual income streams were sold
off on the same basis as landed endowments, creating a new class of
lay impropriators, who thereby became
entitled to the income from tithes and glebe lands, albeit that they also as lay rectors
became liable to maintain the fabric of the parish chancel. Where
the monastery had not endowed a vicar, the lay rector was additionally obliged to
establish a stipend for a perpetual
curate.

It is unlikely that the monastic system could have been broken
simply by royal action had there not been the overwhelming bait of
personal enrichment for gentry
large and small, and the convictions of the small but determined
Protestant faction. Anti-clericalism was a familiar
feature of late medieval Europe, producing its own strain of
satiric literature that was aimed at a literate middle class.[1]

Along with the destruction of the monasteries, some of them many
hundreds of years old, the related destruction of the monastic libraries was perhaps the
greatest cultural loss caused by the English Reformation. Worcester
Priory (now Worcester Cathedral) had 600 books at the time of
the dissolution. Only six of them are known to have survived intact
to the present day. At the abbey of the Augustinian Friars at York,
a library of 646 volumes was destroyed, leaving only three known
survivors. Some books were destroyed for their precious bindings,
others were sold off by the cartload. The antiquarian John Leland was commissioned by
the King to rescue items of particular interest (especially
manuscript sources of Old English history), and other collections
were made by private individuals; notably Matthew Parker. Nevertheless much was
lost, especially manuscript books of English church music, none of
which had then been printed.

A great nombre of them whych purchased those supertycyous
mansyons, resrved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr jakes, some to scoure
candelstyckes, and some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to
the grossers and soapsellers.

—John Bale, 1549

The Act of 1539 also provided for the suppression of religious
hospitals; which had
constituted in England a distinct class of institution, endowed for
the purpose of caring for older people. A very few of these, such
as Saint
Bartholomew's Hospital in London, were excepted by special
royal dispensation, but most closed, their residents being
discharged with small pensions. Monasteries had also supplied free
food and alms for the poor and destitute, and it has been argued
that the removal of this and other charitable resources, amounting
to about 5% of net monastic income, was one of the factors in the
creation of the army of "sturdy beggars" that plagued late Tudor
England, causing the social instability that led to the Edwardian
and Elizabethan Poor Laws. Monasteries and nunneries had
necessarily undertaken schooling for their novice members, which in the later medieval
period had tended to extend to cover choristers and sometimes other younger scholars;
and all this educational resource was lost with their dissolution.
By contrast, where monasteries had provided grammar schools
for older scholars, these were commonly refounded with enhanced
endowments; some by royal command in connection to the newly
re-established cathedral churches, others by private initiative.
Monastic orders had maintained, for the education of their members,
six colleges at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge; of which
five survived as refoundations. Hospitals too were frequently to be
re-endowed by private benefactors; and many new almshouses and
charities were to be founded by the Elizabethan gentry and
professional classes. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that only
in 1580 did overall levels of charitable giving in England returned
to those before the dissolution. On the eve of the overthrow, the
various monasteries owned approximately 2,000,000 acres (just under
8 100 km²), over 16 percent of England, with tens of
thousands of tenant farmers working those lands; some of whom had
family ties to a particular monastery going back many
generations.

It has been argued that the suppression of the English
monasteries and nunneries contributed as well to the spreading
decline of that contemplative spirituality which once thrived in
Europe, with the occasional exception found only in groups such as
the Society of Friends
("Quakers"). This may be set against the continuation in the
retained and newly established cathedrals of the daily singing of
the Divine
Office by choristers and vicars choral, now undertaken as
public worship, which had not been the case before the dissolution.
The deans and prebends of the six new cathedrals were
overwhelmingly former heads of religious houses. The secularised
former monks and friars commonly looked for re-employment as parish
clergy; and consequently numbers of new ordinations dropped
drastically in the ten years after the dissolution, and ceased
almost entirely in the reign of Edward VI. It was only in 1549,
after Edward came to the throne, that former monks and nuns were
permitted to marry; but within a year of the permission being
granted around a quarter had done so, only to find themselves
forcibly separated (and denied their pensions) in the reign of
Mary. On the succession of Elizabeth, these former monks (happily
reunited with both their wives and their pensions) formed the
backbone of the new Anglican church, and may properly claim much
credit for maintaining the religious life of the country until a
new generation of ordinands became available in the 1560s and
1570s.

Although it had been promised that King's enhanced wealth would
enable the founding or enhanced endowment of religious, charitable
and educational institutions, in practice only about 15% of the
total monastic wealth was reused for these purposes. This
comprised: the refoundation of eight out of nine former monastic
cathedrals (Coventry being
the exception), together with six wholly new bishoprics (Bristol, Chester, Gloucester, Oxford, Peterborough, Westminster) with their associated
cathedrals, chapters, choirs and grammar schools; the refoundation
as secular colleges of monastic houses in Brecon, Thornton and Burton on Trent,
the endowment of five Regius Professorships in each of the
universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the endowment of the colleges
of Trinity College, Cambridge,
and Christ Church, Oxford and the
maritime charity of Trinity House. About a third of total
monastic income was required to maintain pension payments to former
monks and nuns, and hence remained with the Court of Augmentations.
This left just over half to be available to be sold at market rates
(very little property was given away by Henry to favoured servants,
and any that was tended to revert to the Crown once their
recipients fell out of favour, and were indicted for treason). By
comparison with the forcible closure of monasteries elsewhere in
Protestant Europe, the English and Welsh dissolutions resulted in a
relatively modest volume of new educational endowments; but the
treatment of former monks and nuns was more generous, and there was
no counterpart elsewhere to the efficient mechanisms established in
England to maintain pension payments over successive decades.

The dissolution and destruction of the monasteries and shrines
was very unpopular in many areas. In the north of England, centring
on Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, the
suppression of the monasteries led to a popular rising, the Pilgrimage
of Grace, that threatened the Crown for some weeks. In 1536
there were major, popular uprisings in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire and a further rising in Norfolk the following year.
Rumours were spread that the King was going to strip the parish
churches too, and even tax cattle and sheep. The rebels called for
an end to the dissolution of the monasteries, for the removal of Cromwell, and for Henry's daughter, and
eldest child, the CatholicMary to
be named as successor in place of his younger son, Edward. Henry defused the movement
with solemn promises, all of which went unkept, and then summarily
executed the leaders.

However, when Mary succeeded to the throne in 1553,
her hopes for a revival of English religious life proved a failure.
Westminster
Abbey, which had been retained as a cathedral, briefly reverted
to being a monastery, but Mary found it very difficult to persuade
former monks and nuns to enter her proposed revived foundations,
and was compelled to import professed religious from Spain. In spite of much prompting,
none of Mary's lay supporters would co-operate in returning their
holdings of monastic lands to religious use; while the lay lords in
Parliament proved unremittingly hostile, as a revival of the
"mitred" abbeys would have returned the House of Lords to having an
ecclesiastical majority. In less than 20 years, the monastic
impulse had effectively been extinguished in England; and was only
revived, even amongst Catholics, in the very different form of the
new and reformed Counter-reformation orders, such as the Jesuits.

References

^Chaucer's Pardoner and other Chaucerian
anticlerical satire are too familiar to need instancing; the
general background is in John Peter, Complaint and Satire in
Early English Literature. (Oxford: Clarendon Press),
1956.

Geoffrey Baskerville, English Monks and the Suppression of
the Monasteries (1937)

Brendan Bradshaw, The Dissolution of the Religious Orders
in Ireland under Henry VIII (1974)

Eamon Duffy
(1992). The Stripping of the Altars:
Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580. Yale
University Press ISBN 0-300-06076-9. An interpretation radically
different from that contained in this article. Duffy maintains that
Henry VIII's reformation was in many ways a radical Protestant
reformation, that Mary I's attempt to restore Catholicism was a
Counter-Reformation effort and that her form of Catholicism was
considerably different from that which Henry VIII had swept
away.

F. A. Gasquet, Henry VIII and the
English Monasteries (8th ed. London 1925)

C. Haigh, The Last Days of the Lancashire Monasteries and
the Pilgrimage of Grace (1969)

H. F. M.
Prescott (1952). The Man on a Donkey. A finely
researched novel, set in the form of a chronicle, of Henry VIII's
dissolution of monasteries and the answering rebellion in the
North, the Pilgrimage of Grace

A. Savine, English Monasteries on the Eve of the
Dissolution (Oxford 1909)

Modern drawing of one of Oliver Cromwell's visitors leaving a monastery. People think this could be Colchester Abbey, after it was ruined.

The Dissolution of the monasteries was an event that happened from 1536 to 1540, when English King Henry VIII took away the land and money that the nuns and monks of the Roman Catholic church owned. Henry VIII then gave this land and money to people that supported him.